A nation of kindergarten rejects

By MOLLY IVINS

AUSTIN - The irony surplus in this nation is simply disgraceful, and we've got to do something about it.

I would recommend a national dose of Dallas, the home of terminal earnestness, reinforced by a stay in my Aunt Eula's Home for the Terminally Literal-Minded, but they're all busy mourning Elvis Presley.

Item No. 1: Do we think Timothy McVeigh realizes that Louis Brandeis was a liberal Jew? The question occurs because McVeigh's Bible, a loathsome volume called The Turner Diaries, is viciously anti-Semitic and holds liberals, along with blacks and Jews, to be the source of all evil. This is the book presumed to be McVeigh's inspiration for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The implication of McVeigh's quote from Brandeis at his formal sentencing - "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." - is that McVeigh was justified in killing 168 people in Oklahoma because the government killed about 80 people near Waco. Not a deep thinker, is he?

Item No. 2: The American Medical Association, the doctors' union, has announced a deal with the Sunbeam Corp. In return for several million dollars, the AMA will give its seal of approval to Sunbeam health-care appliances, such as humidifiers and heating pads.

The AMA has not and will not test these products to see if they are the best or best-value-for-money on the market; the seal of approval is being bought by Sunbeam regardless of quality and price.

You may think the word we want here is "crass" rather than "ironic," but only if you forget the AMA's many protestations over the years that its sole concern is the welfare of the patient. This claim is made with great regularity whenever the AMA lobbies in Washington against national health insurance, capping Medicare payments to doctors or anything else that might put a dent in doctors' income. The AMA always claims that its sole concern is for the patient - the notion of lucre never crosses its collective mind.

Item No. 3: The city of Boerne, Texas, and local Roman Catholics have reached an agreement on the conflict that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The local sanctuary will be enlarged, as the church wished, without violation of the city's historic preservation ordinance, as the city wished. Hallelujah.

Of course, both parties could have saved themselves a lot of money if ...

Item No. 4: On Wall Street, where irony is a way of life, news that wholesale prices fell in July for an unprecedented seventh straight month (good news for the economy) could not balance the reports of robust retail sales (good news for the economy), and the market went into a funk.

According to the financial pages, it was not "panic" but "anxiety" that gripped the market. Have you ever noticed the stock market's close resemblance to a Victorian maiden? Silly thing swoons away at the slightest provocation.

Item No. 5: In Washington (which has been beyond irony for years now), out there on the far frontiers of the galaxy, where the ludicrous is so normal that suspension of disbelief is as necessary as breathing, Congress continues to investigate campaign financing, about which its leaders have resolutely pledged to do absolutely nothing.

Rep. Dan Burton, the Inspector Clouseau of campaign-finance investigators, is now complaining because the State Department finally tracked down Charlie Trie for him in China but Trie got away before Burton could phone him, which of course would have cleared up everything. Burton contends that this is further evidence of a White House cover-up.

Item No. 6: And then, of course, the one aspect of American life even more bizarre than Washington: s-e-x. The lawyer defending the Army's top enlisted man against charges of sexual harassment promises to bring down the brass on the same charges - including, he says, some multi-star generals. Whoopee. Just what we need. More investigations of the sex lives of anybody and everybody.

Lewis Lapham, one of my favorite curmudgeons, has an essay in the current issue of Harper's on s-e-x.

"As might be expected of people engulfed in a haze of quasi-pornographic images," he observes, we are confused. We have not yet "discovered a system of moral value that corresponds to the working of big-time, post-industrial capitalism ... unless we wish to say that what is moral is what an insurance company will pay for." I recommend Lapham's extended grousing on the subject. It's also funny.

Friends, do you ever get the feeling that we, as a nation, need to Get a Grip here? I realize there is no shortage of public scolds in this great country; our public scold supply is only slightly exceeded by the irony surplus.

But there are days when the fellow who thought he'd learned everything he ever needed to know in kindergarten doesn't seem that far off the mark. Seem to be a lot of people who flunked kindergarten around these days.